in the Jewish and Christian religions, a Hebrew prophet who said that God would send a messiah to save the Jews. The Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament of the Bible contains his prophecies (8th century BC). flourished 8th century BC, Jerusalem Prophet of ancient Israel after whom the biblical book of Isaiah is named. He is believed to have written only some of the book's first 39 chapters; the rest are by one or more unknown authors. Isaiah's call to prophesy came 742 BC, when Assyria was beginning the westward expansion that later overran Israel. A contemporary of Amos, Isaiah denounced economic and social injustice among the Israelites and urged them to obey the Law or risk cancellation of God's covenant. He correctly predicted the destruction of Samaria, or northern Israel, in 722 BC, and he declared the Assyrians to be the instrument of God's wrath. The Christian Gospels lean more heavily on the book of Isaiah than on any other prophetic text, and its "swords-into-plowshares" passage has universal appeal
name given to the hypothetical second author of the Book of Isaiah (according to a theory that the Book of Isaiah was written by three separate authors)
born June 9, 1909, Riga, Latvia died Nov. 5, 1997, Oxford, Eng. Latvian-born British political philosopher and historian of ideas. His family immigrated to Britain in 1920. Educated at the University of Oxford, Berlin taught there from 1950 to 1967, serving as president of Wolfson College from 1966 to 1975 and thereafter teaching at All Souls College. His writings on political philosophy are chiefly concerned with the problem of free will in increasingly totalitarian and mechanistic societies. His most important works include Karl Marx (1939), The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), Historical Inevitability (1955), The Age of Enlightenment (1956), and Four Essays on Liberty (1969)